Binding: Hardback
Date Published: 17 Feb 2025
Marking the centenary of the Gold Cup, Cheltenham’s Festival’s most prestigious race, this book celebrates an annual event that consistently delivers epic and incredible racing, and tells the festival’s amazing story, including the dramatic mo- ments, breath-taking excitement, unlikely heroes and real-life fairy tales. Rightly known as “The Greatest Show on Turf”, the Cheltenham Festival is a sporting event like no other. The beautiful Cotswold Hills setting is unmatched, the atmosphere is by turns buzzing with excitement, elegant and refined and frenzied and celebratory, and its history features names that resonate across the ages, such as equine celebrities Kauto Star, Best Mate, Denman, Golden Miller and Arkle, jockeys from Pat Taaffe to Ruby Walsh and Rachael Blackmore, and masterful trainers of the likes of Willie Mullins and Nicky Henderson. The biggest occasion in the jump season calendar, the festival attracts the highest calibre of jockeys, trainers and horses to what is often called the National Hunt Olympics; a series of races each testing different attributes and each the toughest event of their kind. It boasts some of the most high profile races in the sport, includ- ing the Champion Hurdle, the Queen Mother Champion Chase, The Stayers’ Hurdle as well as the Cheltenham Gold Cup, and to win to the sound of the famous “Cheltenham Roar” is the dream of every chaser or hurdler, from amateur to novice to seasoned jumper. This book traces the Cheltenham Festival’s evolution from shaky beginnings into an incredible spectacle where the aristocracy mingle with day trippers, while the Irish arrive in their thousands to make this small Gloucester town seem like an outpost of the Emerald Isle. It looks at how the race was established over a hundred years ago in Prestbury Park, in a natural amphitheatre on the outskirts of the town, and, decade-by-decade, follows the great events, races, stories, personalities and sport- ing heroes – human and equine. A glorious celebration of the world’s greatest jump-racing event, showcasing 100 years of the incomparable Cheltenham Gold Cup.